Why this world ?

Why this world ?

Mid-September walking down Fitzjohn’s Avenue in Hampstead pavements carpetted in dry brittle leaves autumn with a vengeance and I think be articulate be vocal be demonstrative and beware you may indeed find what you are looking for and yet lose what you have money is a broad church ambition too and love is not a lifestyle

Then on to Maresfield Gardens to the house where Sigmund Freud lived his final years and which he called ‘our last address on this planet’ and I wonder where he thoughthe was headed perhaps to the Western Lands of Egyptian mythology and how we are to the best of our knowledge the only conscious beings in the universe and for that reason its centre although it has no centre and with consciousness the need to express to understand and share our inner thoughts and our feelings to represent them in language and in every conceivable art to communicate throughbroad verbal gestures and I read Sharon Olds and the outpourings of raw emotion in her poetry as daughter mother and partner acutely perceptive and confessional centred as she is on the intimacies and obsessionsaround her sexuality and filled with vital images that remind me that I too have seen healing sunshine penetrate another body seen the light absorbed in the hair and under the skin and into the smile and known that love is not an object nor an attitude of the will or the mind but an irresistible gravitational urge or movement towards another being I too saw one such sit legs crossed by the open window and watched as recollections of the past percolated through her sensibility her hair swept back and on her thin lips an expression of unfinished business and why this world in which so little is ever truly owned except perhaps in the nakedness of love and the conviction that it is the only thing that mitigates against the final handful of ash and dust tossed pointlessly
from the Brooklyn Bridge or some such height

Late swell of summer sun with the beauty and silence of vast autumn migrations abandoned lives hung in wardrobes epic manifestations of the providential body and each word each chosen action weighed in the balance praying for the wisdom God help us to know love when we see it to respond to love when we feel it and againwhy this world and was any of this all the chaotic stuff of years anything other than really necessary to quote Wallace Stevens a thoroughly necessary life and a necessary love and longing to lie secure and at ease in the accuracy of her necessary arms and to be finally acknowledged